For Archbishop Chaput, Father James Martin's ad hominem trashing of faithful Catholics is apparently just fine

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"...when the true doctrine is unpopular, it is not right to seek easy popularity.."

Christopher Stefanick is anxious to dismiss the legitimate concerns of orthodox Catholics who are rightly concerned over recent comments made by Pope Francis. Writing for the "Catholic" Free Press [Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts], a newspaper with a long history of promoting dissent from Catholic moral teaching, he says, "Pope Francis isn't endearing himself to 'the left' or 'the right' - those poles that have so painfully torn apart the Church since Vatican II...Those who have come to experience the Church as a conservative fortress to keep sinners out rather than as a launching pad for a mission to serve the world, sinners included, are rightly threatened by Francis." (How do you solve a problem like Pope Francis?, The Catholic Free Press, December 20, 2013). Catholics faithful to both Sacred Scripture and Tradition do not view the Church as a "conservative fortress to keep sinners out." But neither do they view the Church as a whorehouse where every sort of sin is either justified and celebrated or at least tolerated. Such Catholics believe the words of Our Lord, "Without Me you can do nothing." And they know asell that, "Unless the Lord builds the house, he labors in vain who builds it." Father Vincent Miceli, himself a Jesuit, warned that, "Only the uncompromising, whole-hearted faith and love of the believer can melt the uncompromising, whole-hearted rebellious hardness of the atheist. Faith begets faith and love, love. Perfect faith dissolves perfect skepticism. To be able to lead men and save ourselves and others, then, believers must be the deepest witnesses of God they can become. The free society of the West is desperately in need of leaders, of men in love with the truth; for only by sharing divine truth and transcendence will man escape the shackles of matter, motion, measurement, and time." We need men in love with the truth. Is Pope Francis such a man? That isn't the perception of many both within and without the Church. For example, E.J. Dionne, a columnist with the Washington Post, writes, "Pope Francis...has won accolades from the gay community for his simple (and very Christian) declaration, 'Who am I to judge them [homosexual persons] if they're seeking the Lord in good faith?'" Of course, the qualifier here is: "if they're seeking the Lord in good faith." But because Pope Francis has succumbed to using the politically-charged propaganda word "gay" while referring to homosexual persons [with all the confusion this can generate, see here: http://lasalettejourney.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-question-for-pope-francis.html], his intentions are not very clear. Which is why Mr. Dionne writes, "...when even the pope wonders aloud as to whether or not it's appropriate for him to judge, you begin to see the difficulty of deciding what 'true Christians' ought to believe. This raises the question of whether the religiously based principles are merely cultural artifacts that we bend to our own immediate purposes...Pope Francis, for one, has warned against the pursuit of 'an exaggerated doctrinal security,' and criticized 'those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists.'" (Duck Dynasty, meet Pope Francis). Exaggerated doctrinal security? A past that no longer exists? The authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted to a Custodian, the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 85). The same Christ Jesus Who is, "..the same yesterday, today, and forever" (Hebrews 13: 8). Faithful Catholics do not view the Lord Jesus or His Church - the doctrine of which represents His mind on matters - as belonging to a past that no longer exists. Rather, they understand that Heaven and earth will pass away, but His words will not pass away. (Matthew 24: 35). No, the Church isn't sa fortress built to keep sinners out. But some sinners freely choose to exclude themselves from Christ, His grace and His Church. Those who embrace certain evils - acts which are intrinsically evil such as homosexual acts - exclude themselves from the Kingdom of God by the truths which they violate: "If we sin deliberately after receiving knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains sacrifice for sins but a fearful prospect of judgment and a flaming fire that is going to consume the adversaries. Anyone who rekects the law of Moses is put to death on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Do you not think that a much worse punishment is due the one who has contempt for the Son of God, considers unclean the covenant-blood by which he was consecrated, and insults the spirit of grace?" (Hebrews 10: 26-29). Orthodox Catholics aren't thrteatened by Francis. But they are concerned that he may not be entirely committed to truth, to sound doctrine. At a time when the rabid homosexual agenda is advancing and "gay marriage" continues to spread like a cancer, we have a Pope who seems to be more interested in being popular than in defending sound doctrine. Pope Francis has said that the Church could collapse like a "house of cards" if it continues to take a strong stance against "gay marriage." One has to wonder how much he trusts the Lord Jesus' promise that the gates of Hell will never prevail against His Church. Christ told us that the road to eternal salvation is not broad and comfortable but rather narrow and difficult (Matthew 7: 13-14). No one who claims to be Catholic has a right to abandon that perspective or to change it - not even a pope!

"The writing is on the wall. Gay marriage is the lie that will create the next Gulag.."

Dr. Jeff Mirus gets it.  He writes, "The writing is on the wall. Gay marriage is the lie that will create the next Gulag. Indeed, gay marriage is the perfect totalitarian wedge, not least in a country like the United States, which has been capable of believing itself uniquely dedicated to liberty even in the midst of slavery and abortion. We Americans, it seems, will be quite willing to sing the praises of our liberty no matter how many of us lose it. It is our national myth, something we worship. But the cause of gay marriage fits the myth better than most issues because it really does seem that those who oppose it are denying life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to others. This denial can be accepted for the unborn, in the name of the liberty of their mothers, as it once was accepted for African Americans, who shared judicial non-personhood with the unborn. But gays are well-educated, wealthy and—above all—a logically favored projection of our moral culture. To inhibit their happiness, for any reason, seems just plain wrong.

Why should this be? First, it is necessary to note that the word “gay” refers not to those with homosexual inclinations but to those who champion behavior based on these inclinations as good. In fact, homosexuals who are not gay are a sign of contradiction to the gay world. They are scorned accordingly, in ways that even straights are not. The key to understanding the whole matter is that to be gay or to support the gay lifestyle is to approve and promote sterile sex.

The Western world in general has been hard at work promoting sterile sex for nearly a century now. We began by sanctioning the break-up of families through ever-easier divorce. Divorce is a kind of pretense that the marital covenant is ultimately sterile, in the sense that children do not matter. Next we embraced contraception so that our sexual pleasures could not be diminished through responsibility. Promiscuity inevitably followed, and with it abortion, which is simply fruitfulness in denial. We’ve covered our eyes and stopped our ears. “Nyah, nyah, nyah, I can’t SEE you! I can’t HEAR you!”

A culture like this, a culture which embraces these values, has no argument against homosexual sex, no case against homosexual marriage. A huge percentage of our marriages are deliberately and totally sterile; most of the rest are deliberately sterile much of the time. Huge numbers of marriages, by deliberate design, result neither in children to preserve the race nor in future citizens to enhance and develop the social order. There is no conceivable public interest in such unions, and no significant personal interest in them either, apart from the fuel they temporarily provide for the couple’s doomed egoism à deux.

Far from having a natural revulsion against homosexual intimacy, modern Western culture can hardly help seeing it as the jewel which crowns and protects its own warped vision of sex. We recognize and defend a right of men and women to engage in sexual intimacy without fruit. It follows that rank prejudice must be the only reason anyone could possibly oppose the same freedom between men and men or women and women.

No group is more hateful to modern society than the perceived moralistic prigs who, out of what most perceive as religiously-motivated prejudice, seek to diminish the personal sexual liberty of others. Nothing could be more obvious in our current culture than that such people must be silenced and, if necessary, restrained. Moreover, it seems only right and just that their denunciation of the gay lifestyle and their opposition to gay marriage should be criminalized. In fact, it should be criminalized in the name of liberty. That is why gay marriage is the lie that will create the next Gulag.

The insistence on ignoring vice is the hallmark of a debased culture, but the insistence that a lie be publicly affirmed as true is the hallmark of ideological totalitarianism." (See here).

Archbishop Dolan gets it now.  Shocked over recent editorials demanding the restriction of religious freedom and calls to coerce religious believers to accept same-sex "marriage," the Archbishop wrote, "We do worry indeed about this freedom of religion. Editorials already call for the removal of guarantees of religious liberty, with crusaders calling for people of faith to be coerced to acceptance of this redefinition. If the experience of those few other states and countries where this is already law is any indication, the churches, and believers, will soon be harassed, threatened, and hauled into court for their conviction that marriage is between one man, one woman, forever, bringing children into the world …"


I have been warning that this was coming since the 1990s.  I have been laughed at and ridiculed for revealing the totalitarian nature of the radical homosexual movement.  Back in June of 2005 I posted the following here at La Salette Journey:


Those who are promoting the homosexual agenda are using time-proven tactics which have been employed by secular humanists for some time now. In the words of Ralph Martin, "First, a plea is issued for a dominantly Christian society to 'tolerate' what appears to be a deviant behavior. Then pressure is applied to place the deviant behavior on an equal footing with traditional Christian values. Secular humanists argue that a pluralist society cannot do otherwise. They then try to make the deviant behavior seem normal and behavior governed by Christian values seem abnormal - a threat to a pluralist society. The last step is often to use the legal system to protect immorality and to undermine what Christians have always considered righteous behavior." (A Crisis of Truth, pp. 101-102).

Professor James Hitchcock, in his excellent work entitled "Catholicism and Modernity" (New York:Seabury Press, 1979, p. 86), explains the role of the media in this entire process: "The media's alleged commitment to 'pluralism' is at base a kind of hoax. The banner of pluralism is raised in order to win toleration for new ideas as yet unacceptable to the majority. Once toleration has been achieved, public opinion is systematically manipulated first to enforce a status of equality between the old and the new, then to assert the superiority of the new over the old. A final stage is often the total discrediting, even sometimes the banning, of what had previously been orthodox." (See here).

Truthfully, isn't that what we're witnessing in Canada and even in the United States (albeit to a still lesser degree)? Already there has been much talk in Canada about passing legislation which would make it a "hate crime" for churches - or individual priests and ministers - to refer to homosexuality as being sinful. The Gospel itself would constitute "hate literature" under legislation which is proposed by homosexual militants who have many friends in the government it would appear.

The United States isn't far behind. Soon, Christians who hold firm to what Sacred Scripture has to say about sodomy will be labelled 'dangerous' and in need of 're-education' or forced internment in a special 'camp.' Perhaps those of us who remain "obstinate" in accepting God's Word will be dealt with in another 'final solution' offered by a society which has succumbed to the 'Dictatorship of Relativism.'

Let's hope and pray that the rest of the Church's hierarchy will awaken to the reality of our present situation and speak out as Archbishop Dolan now has.